Online video streaming through internet become one of network applications as the advance of bandwidth and video compression technology. For example, in large-scale and high-quality video/audio service applications, Master/Slave architecture is used to provide video streaming service, or a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture is used to store and share information between peers. Online video service technology provides two service modes, one is the live broadcasting mode, the other is video on demand (VoD) mode.
When using P2P architecture to provide live broadcasting services, due to the timings for peers watching video content are similar, each of peers may not need to store large amount of video for each sending, receiving, and exchanging of video/audio data content, so as to achieve the effect of data sharing among peers. When using P2P architecture to provide a VoD service, each peer may view different video/audio content at different time, that is, each peer requires different video and audio data at different time. Therefore, each peer stores more video and audio data that have been viewed, and the opportunity of sharing each own video and audio data between peers is also relatively higher. For video and audio data that have not been stored and shared, the peer may grab the desired video and audio data from a video server. However, the loading amount of the video server will be increased.
In applications of using P2P architecture to provide VoD services, more and more users use VoD services through a lightweight device (such as smart phone, tablet PC, set-top box (STB), etc.). In the environment of using P2P architecture to provide VoD services, when a single peer is a lightweight device, the storage space in the single peer is limited and usually has a small capacity, and may not store the video and audio data having a large amount or been viewed, so that the single peer is less likely to become a data provider for the P2P network. Therefore, the P2P sharing rate of the video and audio data among peers is relatively low, and the loading of a server providing the video and audio data source is more likely increased.
For transmission and sharing of VoD among peers, the existing technologies may usually cut the video and audio data into small blocks. Then peer(s) gradually grabs video and audio data to be viewed from a server or other peers. The video and audio data stored in each peer may, based on the time whether to view, include such as the video and audio data which are already down-streamed and completely stored, or the video and audio data which are partially stored, or the video and audio data that have been deleted partial stored video and audio data. Under a situation that a peer does not have an enough storage space, a technique may calculate the bandwidth gap via the global information of a P2P VoD service environment, such as a movie playback rate (PBR), an aggregation service rate (ASR), a movie request rate/movie popularity, a total number of peers in the video and audio streaming system, and so on, to determine whether the peer stores the video and audio data. So that the video and audio data content stored in each peer may achieve the P2P sharing effect, and reduce the loading of the server.
Users may use VoD services via at least one peer (such as a lightweight device) and this is becoming more popular. It may use a dynamically adjustable storing probability to determine whether the video and audio data to be stored in the storage space of a peer. And this storing probability may be dynamically adjustable according to the timing point of sharing the video and audio data required by a demand peer, or the bit rate of the video and audio data, or the storage space of peer, so that for each peer with a limited storage space, the stored video and audio data may achieve a P2P sharing effect. This may be one of many ways to increase the P2P sharing rate of the video and audio data, and may reduce the loading of the server.